Apple’s New Pages 5.0 — This is a joke, right?

Last night Apple launched some new products—new laptops, new iPads a new version of the operating system (OS X Mavericks) plus a long-overdue update for iWork, Apple’s office suite of applications which hasn’t had a decent overhaul since 2009.

As an avid Pages and Keynote user, I was excited about getting a decent update for these two applications. Pages is Apple’s answer to Microsoft’s Word; Keynote is Apple’s answer to Microsoft’s Powerpoint. So I wasted no time downloading these two applications straight away.

I can say, hand on heart, that I have never—ever—been so disappointed by an Apple product. I can’t help but wonder if the people who redesigned Pages (which is the worse of the two) actually tried using what they’ve created. They certainly don’t word-process for a living, that’s for sure.

Instead of a bar (or bars) along the top or a floating window to make changes (such as sizing, styles, add weblink, etc.), there is now a window on the right hand side. You can’t move it around (not even to the left side) and it takes up a huge amount of real estate. The content of this window changes depending on what you have selected on your workspace, which isn’t so bad, but it takes up so much space! And it looks … well, cheap and clunky, to be honest.

But what I find most galling is Apple’s decision to have a 3-columned header and footer with no way of changing this.

I honestly don’t know what mind-alternating medication was taken when this idea was concocted but it severely limits the creation of decent headers or footers. I don’t want 3 columns in my header; I want one. I can’t help but think that Apple has done this to give newcomers to the world of Pages and word-processing a ‘helping hand’. Why While this may be a laudable viewpoint, the inability to change it alienates those who prefer to be a bit more imaginative, thank you very much.

You can’t even add an image into a header or a footer so if you want to use your company’s logo, you’re out of luck.

While there may be some new features such as ‘share’, which allows more than one person to work on a document at the same time, this feels like a massive backwards step.

I’m seriously considering going back to Microsoft Word (which I loathe) because of this ‘update’ and that’s a shame because I’ve been a faithful user of Pages since the beginning. But I have to be able to use it, and use it effectively, or else it’s just a waste of time.

Sorry, Apple, this is one of those very rare occasions when you’ve really let me down.